Reviews

I have yet to meet one other person who remembers this show, so it is no wonder that it has lapsed into obscurity. The fact that it's been more than 20 years since it was last broadcast certainly hasn't helped it's legacy, which is a shame, because Insight is arguably one of the very best TV series in the history of the medium. A religious-themed drama anthology series of morality plays that featured some of the most talented actors, writers and directors of the era, it had less to do with promoting religious doctrine than it did with exploring the human condition and topical issues of the period. I never watched an episode of Insight without coming away with food for thought concerning whatever moral or ethical issue that was explored in the episode, and I've never seen a bad one (although the very best ones seem to have been made during the late 60s to mid 70s). As for the show itself, you never knew what you were going to get when you tuned in to an episode of Insight. Not unlike The Twilight Zone (the show to which it is most often compared), the series format included every possible genre from science fiction and fantasy to melodrama to comedy, and the show had the amazing ability to not only amuse, unsettle or shock the viewer, it sometimes managed to do all of those things within a single episode. Shot on videotape on a visibly low budget and broadcast without commercials, and filmed on sparsely decorated sets where actors occasionally flubbed their lines, the show nevertheless managed to overcome it's budgetary constraints to deliver a consistently high quality series of episodes aided not only by the aforementioned top-level talent but an effective use of surreal images and unsettling musical scores. For reasons that are unclear to me, we may never see this series broadcast again (or released on DVD). However, a number of episodes have somehow made their way onto YouTube. We can only hope that this series will once again be re-released on a larger scale. The show was too amazing to be allowed to fade into obscurity.